The Manual

A manual is currently in production by members of the Computing At School working group. This began on the 13 October 2011 and is due to be ready for early March 2012. The manual is aimed at the project's target audience, children, so that they can take their "First steps in Computer Science".

For the first release (~January/February 2012), there will mostly likely be very minimal documentation. A 'schools' release is due in June/July 2012.

Your Projects

Doing a project at school or have a Raspberry Pi Club? Add it in this section to allow others to follow your progress!

Please add details of your group and what plans you have for the RPi or provide a link to your homepage.

Organizations

Swansea ITeC

We're running a 'Raspberry PITeC' project unded by an RSC Wales Technology for Learning Small Grant program to engage our Traineeship learners in more hands on IT. We're keeping a blog of the process - Social Pi - which staff and learners will contribute to and as part of the grant process will be releasing all resources we create, which will probably involve a Moodle course, back into the community. We're also maintaining a Diigo list of useful resources we find along the way.

Puppy hacker School

For smarter kids of all ages, teachers, self-tutored and the fast learner. Based on doacracy principles of learning by doingPuppy Hacker School is open for learning on your existing hardware, using Puppy Linux. Whilst awaiting your first punnet of raspberries, get cracking. All bones welcome.

Computer History Museum, Silicon Valley

The Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California, has an educational program which provides resources to educators and students from pre-school up through graduate school levels. Museum staff and volunteers provide tours of the museum's exhibits that contain the largest collection of computing artifacts in the world, from the abacus through massively-parallel supercomputers. Modern computing fundamentals are introduced, from how individual transistor circuits hold binary values, through data processing, input/output, short and long-term storage, and a wide variety of software, from the earliest punched card programs to current operating systems and programming languages. We will be coordinating hosting Raspberry Pi user groups in the area after boards start being delivered, and will provide assistance to educators and students in setting up their R-Pi systems and learning how to perform software development, from games to whatever anyone wants. We will also participate in developing educational documentation in the eLinux.org R-Pi wiki and contributing to the Computing At School (CAS) initiative.

Schools

Manchester Grammar School Computing Society, The

A new co-curricular club for Y9 boys aimed squarely at the new "UK Computing in Schools" initiative. Details of what we're doing are on the MGS Computing Society page.

Winsford E-Act Academy Programming Club

This is an after-school club set up to encourage students to learn programming and more about how computers work. There's a blog site to support the club at teampython. We are very excited about the Raspberry Pi and can't wait to get our hands on one. For the time being, we are learning Python 3 with Pygame. To get the students used to using Linux, we are using a remaster of Puppy that's available here: RacyPy2. Anyone who wants to join in online or share ideas is very welcome!

Trinity School Computer Club

Universities

Kent - School of Computing, The University of

Many of both the students and staff at the School of Computing have been following the Raspberry Pi for a long time and are eagerly waiting to get started on projects using them. We are also strong supporters of the Foundation's objective in getting more young people interested in "real" computing rather than just playing games or web browsing.

Manchester - School of Computer Science, University of

Pi Projects at Manchester. We've got a competition for the best Raspberry Pi Project starting soon, and are getting activities together for schools and youth groups.

We want to use the Raspberry Pi with a simple hardware board and set of downloadable activities to use it to encourage young people (or anyone else) get into embedded computing. We're currently looking at piface for the interface board and trying to come up with little activities to do. We've got some ideas but would love some more if anyone else wants to get involved.

Object Pascal (aka Delphi) - a modernized version of the Pascal language, with OOP and much much more. A fantastic language that is easy to learn, read and write. It is also a very versatile language that can be used for Desktop apps, Daemon/Services, Embedded system and Web development.

E-Slate (http://e-slate.cti.gr) – exploratory learning environment workbench and pre-fabricated, interoperable computational objects. Software Microworlds are easily constructed by plugging components in various configurations, and the behavior of both components and Microworlds can be programmed in a Logo-based scripting language implemented in Java.

Fluxus (http://linux.softpedia.com/progDownload/fluxus-Download-15847.html) - reads live audio, OSC network messages, keyboard, or mouse input for simple game development, and a physics engine is included for real-time simulations of rigid-body dynamics. The built-in Scheme code editor runs on top of the renderer, allowing editing of scripts while they are running. Fluxus supports procedural modeling and animation, texturing, and basic material properties.

Frink (http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs) - a full-featured programming language for physical computations which runs on the Java Virtual Machine and has both a terminal-like interface as well as a standard program editor.

GA Viewer (http://www.geometricalgebra.net/gaviewer_download.html) - open source Linux graphical calculator for Geometric Algebra (GA) for physical applications, a mathematical lingua franca uniting and replacing vectors, quaternions, differential forms, complex analysis, many linear algebra and tensor applications, and homogenous and conformal systems. It condenses the full, relativistic form of Maxwell`s equations into just four symbols and also works well in every other area of physics, including quantum mechanics.

Guido van Robot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G….._van_Robot) – robot control program similar to Logo or Karel, with a minimal Python syntax. A variant that includes the full Python syntax and a canonical set of lessons called RUR-PLE also exists.

Karel, Karel++, and Karel J. Robot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K….._language)) – for absolute beginners, used to control a simple robot in a city consisting of a rectangular grid of streets. Karel is its own programming language, Karel++ is a version of Karel implemented in C++, and Karel J. Robot is a version of Karel implemented in Java. NCLab offers free Karel programming (albeit with a modified syntax closer to Python) through a web browser.

Kodu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodu) – entirely icon-based Microsoft Research project for younger children and especially girls. Programs are composed of pages, which are divided into rules, which are further divided into conditions and actions, and conditions are evaluated simultaneously. Designed for game development and provides specialized primitives derived from gaming scenarios. Programs are expressed in physical terms, using concepts like vision, hearing, and time to control character behavior. Available as a free Windows download in public beta and academic forms, and as a low-cost Xbox 360 Live download.

Learn to Program BASIC (circa 1998) – BASIC interpreter with an interactive course intended to teach the language to middle school students. Game-specific additions to the BASIC language include 2D sprite support. Programs written in "LTPB" could be executed on computers without the software by means of a freely-distributable "runner".

LegoSheets – a programming language for the Lego Mindstorms based on AgentSheets which had a less steep learning curve than Brick Logo.

Mama (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M….._(software)) – object oriented programming language for young students in a subset of their local human language, both left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL) syntaxes. A variant of Mama was built on top of Alice for scripting of 3-D stage objects for building 3D animations and games.

OfLiveCoding (http://code.google.com/p/oflivecoding/) - allows modification of a Javascript program at runtime, allowing real-time views of how the modifications affect the behavior and flow of the executed code.

Phrogram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrogram) – second-gen Kid"s Programming Language is a commercial easy-to-learn programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) that emphasizes graphics and sounds, is a simplified structured language, offers component-based development features such as classes and methods, and is modeled on Eclipse and Visual Studio .NET IDEs to help transition to them.

ProcessingJS (http://processingjs.org/) - Javascript version of Processing allowing code to be run within a web browser.

Pynguin (http://code.google.com/p/pynguin) – Python Turtle Graphics editor, interactive console, and graphics display area implemented in Python and the PyQt toolkit (in contrast to the wxPython of PythonTurtle). Meant to be an easy environment for introducing programming concepts to beginning programmers.

PythonTurtle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P…..thonTurtle) – LOGO-like turtle graphics implemented in wxPython. There is also Python standard Turtle graphics module (based on TK), and Python Turtle Demo examples for using Python and turtlegraphics in an educational setting.

RoboMind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboMind) – educational programming environment that lets beginners program a robot via popular programming techniques, some robotics, and artificial intelligence principles. The robot can be programmed in Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, English and Swedish.

Stagecast Creator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…..st_Creator) – visual programming system based on programming by demonstration via movement of icons on the screen, and it generates rules for the objects (characters). Users can create two-dimensional simulations that model a concept, multi-level games, interactive stories, etc.

WISE-Quatar.org - The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) is an international platform for creative thinking, debate and action to raise the status of education through year-round programs to transform education by highlighting its leading role in global development, and by fostering innovative thinking and practices. Efforts include:

Hackety Hack - an open source application that teaches coding in a simple manner.

fpGUI Toolkit - an open source, custom drawn, cross-platform GUI toolkit implemented in 100% Object Pascal, and fully tested on the RPi. Thanks to the Free Pascal Compiler this toolkit can be used for Desktop and Embedded development work, with a single set of source code.